Delicate Genius Blog

A few people at work have been chatting about David Weinberger’s book, Everything is Miscellaneous. I first heard of this book from Weinberger’s Google TechTalk so I thought I’d share.

It’s worth watching this video just for his tirade on the Dewey Decimal System.

Simply put, the concept of the book is that ordering things in the digital world is different to physical world.

So in the real world we’re bound by the concept of one thing in one place – ie one physical object cannot occupy multiple places.

However, in the digital world we should not be bound by this old school thinking. In the digital world, everyone can contribute to cataloging and classification of stuff. Stuff can be placed anywhere (using taxonomy and folksonomy to define where it is and what it’s about) or nowhere (search and indexing).

I also find it interesting how he views the increasing irrelevance of metadata as the data is now the metadata when you think about the usage scenarios (ignore me, it’ll all make sense when you watch the vid :-)).

For me, it ultimately comes down to the very cool concept faceted classification. It gives the best of both worlds (dynamic hierarchical retrieval and tag based classification). And even cooler, much if this classification online, being generated “in process”.

-dg